futuro della Jugoslavia?

[Paola Lucchesi <paola.lucchesi@mail.inet.it>]

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YUGOSLAVIA: WTO SETS UP BODY TO NEGOTIATE YUGOSLAVIA'S ENTRY

The World Trade Organization agreed last week to set up a working
party to negotiate terms of entry for Yugoslavia.
The old Yugoslavia was a member of the WTO's predecessor body, the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), until it was suspended
in 1992 as a country disintegrated in war.
The former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia are already WTO
members. Bosnia and Macedonia have applied but still not started
detailed negotiations.
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YUGOSLAVIA: SERBIA EYES NEW PRIVATIZATION LAW BY APRIL

Serbia's new privatization minister said he was preparing new
legislation allowing the use of different models in the planned sell-
off of some 7,000 state or socially-owned firms in Serbia.
Speaking a few days after Serbia's new reformist government took
office, the minister Aleksandar Vlahovic said he expected the law to
be ready by April.
He said it would largely abandon the privatization model used by
Slobodan Milosevic's ousted authorities.
The new privatization law will partly mean abandoning the insider
privatization concept. It will be a combination of different
approaches and models.
Under the existing ownership transformation law, passed by
Milosevic's government in 1997, up to 60 percent of a company's
capital is given to its workers and pensioners in the form of shares
and the rest sold to investors in exchange for cash.
Vlahovic said this way of selling state firms did not allow for
growth and development because it was unclear who the majority owner
was and who ran the company, saying workers would be better off with
a successful firm than with worthless shares.
Out of some 7,000 Serb companies to be privatized, 631 had started
the process with an estimated book value of $1 billion. There would
be no revisions of privatizations conducted so far, only if there had
been flagrant violations of the law.
He said priorities were to bring in new strategic partners and create
an environment for the development of small businesses, seen as
crucial to help the Serbian economy recover after a decade of
conflict and economic sanctions.
There would be no deadline for privatization as some companies could
start the process immediately and others, such as large energy
companies, needed more time.
"I expect that four years from now socially-owned capital will be
completely eliminated, we will have private and state ownership and
we will start privatization of big systems but it will still be under
way in some cases," Vlahovic said.
Vlahovic was speaking at the end of a two-day seminar to discuss
privatization experience in other ex-communist European countries,
attended by representatives of the World Bank and experts from
Poland, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia.
Their experiences will be valuable when Yugoslavia draws up its own
privatization concept


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